What We Read Today 27 June 2014

Econintersect: Every day our editors collect the most interesting things they find from around the internet and present a summary “reading list” which will include very brief summaries of why each item has gotten our attention. Suggestions from readers for “reading list” items are gratefully reviewed, although sometimes space limits the number included.

• China finds $15 billion of loans tied to falsified gold deals (Fayen Wong, Reuters) It is common for companies and individuals in China to pledge commodities as security for loans. Auditors have discovered that borrowers have falsified gold transactions for more than $15 billion in bank loans.

• Chinese economic confidence retreating: survey (Xinhua) The official news agency of the Chinese government reports than confidence is slipping among entrepreneurs (down 2.1% to 64.9) and among bankers (down 13.9% to 53.7). Among “savers” in the population confidence about employment was only 47.8. The confidence numbers are percentages of respondents with confidence about the future of the economy in surveys conducted by the PBoC (Peoples’ Bank of China).

• Where Do You Fit in the Political Typology? (Pew Research) Take the Pew quiz to type-cast your political self-brand. Econintersect found the questions gave options that were too cut and dry for our taste – we think that many of our problems today are because people make only black and white choices whereas real life should have more nuances. Nonetheless, complete the questionnaire and face your political label as Pew defines it. There is more about the Pew survey results ‘behind the wall’.

• When It Rains, It Pours … on the Sun (Royal Astronomy Society, Scientific Computing) Electronic plasma functions on the surface and in the atmosphere of the sun in a manner similar to the behavior of water on earth. Processes on the sun involve evaporative processes on the sun’s surface with plasma material rising to the sun’s corona, condensing there into “clouds” from which plasma “rain” falls back to the surface.

• Higgs Boson Seems To Prove That The Universe Doesn’t Exist (Brid-Aine Parnell, Forbes) This is a terribly misleading title. The article reveals that the latest work with the theory associated with the Higgs boson indicate that the universe exists in a metastable energy state and that a sufficient energy perturbation would “tip” the universe over the edge into collapse. A two dimensional diagram used in illustration of phase equilibria in thermodynamics and chemical states in physics is shown below. Energy increases vertically so that an energetic state (called “metastable”) exists only because some sort of energy “barrier” separates it on the horizontal “state” axis from the lowest possible energy configuration for the system, the “stable” state. If the sufficient energy is supplied to the system then the energetic (metastable) state can collapse to the lowest energy (stable) state. Thus a better title might be “Higgs Boson Seems to Prove that the Universe is in a Possibly Temporary State and Could Ultimately Collapse“.

Today there are 9 articles discussed ‘behind the wall’.

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